Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record

The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) is a shared electronic health summary set up by the Australian government with implementation overseen by the National Electronic Health Transition Authority (NEHTA). The purpose of the PCEHR is to provide a secure electronic summary of people's medical history which will eventually include information such as current medications, adverse drug reactions, allergies and immunisation history in an easily accessible format. This PCEHR is stored in a network of connected systems with the view to improving the sharing of information amongst health care providers to improve patient outcomes no matter where in Australia a patient presents for treatment. It is currently an opt-in system with a unique individual healthcare identifier (IHI) being assigned to participants and the option of masking and limiting information available for viewing controlled by the patient or a nominated representative.

Currently it is reported that on average, each Australian has 22 health system interactions annually, be that General practitioner (GP) visits, specialists, or prescriptions. All of these interactions are held in individual, separate, paper-based records making the entire health picture of an individual difficult to ascertain. It is also reported that up to 10% of hospital admissions are due to adverse drug events, 18% are due to medical errors relating to lack of adequate available patient information, and an estimated 25% of clinicians time is spent collecting information regarding the patient than actually treating them. These facts combined with the ageing Australian population, vast geographic expanse, and ever increasing population, have necessitated the implementation of the PCEHR in an effort to bring the medical record into the 21st century.

As part of the 2010/11 Australian federal budget the Hon. Nicola Roxon (Minister for Health and Aging) announced the PCEHR as a "key building block of the National Health and Hospitals Network". The system went live on 1 July 2012

The system is based on the XDS (Cross Enterprise Document Sharing) Profile published by Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). However, the usual IHE Patient Management system (PIX/PDQ) has been replaced by the National Health Identity (HI) Service. In addition the usual authentication and security IHE profiles have been replaced by, or significantly modified to work with, existing infrastructure.

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